


Wishes and Promises

by plaidventurer



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Torture, Dark, Dean Has Nightmares, Dean Needs A Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s05e03 Free to Be You and Me, Episode: s05e04 The End, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Language, Heavy Angst, Hell, Hurt Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Minor Castiel/Dean Winchester, POV Dean Winchester, Sam Needs A Hug, Suicidal Sam, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-31 00:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12664530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plaidventurer/pseuds/plaidventurer
Summary: Sam challenges Lucifer's vow to keep him alive until he says yes, but things don't turn out quite as planned.Dean is plagued with nightmares that seem disturbingly close to visions.Lucifer has a lesson to teach, and a month is a long time in Hell.Temporary major character death & more warnings in tags.





	Wishes and Promises

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING for themes of suicide, torture, depression, and (temporary) major character death. Supernatural and its characters do not belong to me.
> 
> This is based on the idea that Lucifer gives Sam a taste of what he can do if he refuses to say yes, and as a result both Sam and Dean suffer the consequences. Set around 05x03 Free to Be You and Me and 05x04 The End, but with a slightly different timeline.

The way Sam goes is sudden and with a bitter aftertaste. All along Dean has been fairly certain that the Winchester family would bite it at the hands of a big bad someday, but Sam was always the exception.

In the end, he leaves on the twentieth of August.

Dean is face-down on a motel bed, sheets crumpled up around his ankles, and his cell rings. He doesn't move. It vibrates again on the faded veneer of the bedside table, and he barely even breathes. The drapes flap lifelessly against an open window. Another bed sits in the corner, blankets dead and flat and cream-colored where a body should be.

There’s a leaky faucet in his motel room, and it reminds him of one time when he and Sam had just started hunting together again. They stayed in a place just like it, with the same sort of stained shag carpet and cigarette burns on all the walls. The bathroom sink leaked with a constant  _drip drip drip_ , and one day Dean came back to the room to find Sam halfway in the cabinet under the sink, duct taping the pipes with an expression of pain on his face.

It had been only a few months after Jess, and apparently the plopping of water droplets on the tile floor ( _drip drip drip_ ) had sounded a little too close to blood.

He dreams, kind of. It's more like reliving memories twisted up in knots. He tosses and turns and pretends to sleep even though there’s no one else around to question him.

The world is dark, and the air doesn't quite taste like anything. Dean turns around blindly in the deepness of a void, a moon above faintly illuminating black trees that wind up from the ground. He falters because he’s standing on nothing, stumbles because his reflection stares back at him from every surface a thousand times over.

_Hello?_

Mom is standing under a tree in the forest with mirror walls. She’s got her nightgown on, creased and cold like the motel drapes, and her face is blank. The branches whistle and something crackles in the distance, hissing and popping. The empty pit Dean is walking on begins to glow red.

 _Mom?_ he tries, and his lips just barely part, but the air is too thick and heavy to do much more than that.

She looks straight through him, still and silent. Her skin is bluish. The moonlight keeps blinking in and out like a dying bulb. Under his feet, the emptiness starts swirling with red clouds, and something in the air begins to sting like metal on his tongue.

And then the world erupts. Mom is on fire, Mom is burning with dark red flames billowing up into the sky, and suddenly _Sam_ flickers into existence like some sort of ghost between the trees.

Dean startles away, hands grasping for a knife that isn’t there because Sam’s eyes are dark and bottomless voids, but Sam is clinging to her hands, Mom’s red and bubbling hands--and now he’s burning, too. He's burning with black eyes cast up to the moonlight ceiling. His hair catches and smolders, and Dean can smell the stench of it and the blood on Sam’s wet breath. It stings his nose and his eyes water even when he jackknifes up in bed, sheets sticky with sweat around him.

There is red on his hands, and the bandage on his side is soaked through. So much for those stitches.

Sam leaves on the twentieth of August.

When Dean finishes restitching and showering, he has three new voicemails, six missed calls and the sky is overcast. One message is from Bobby at 12:34 AM. Dean plays it with the phone between his chin and shoulder while he makes coffee, a paper cup in his hand. Bobby’s buzzing voice tells him that he found a rougarou case in Atlanta if Dean wants to take a look. The coffee machine rattles and shoots lukewarm liquid all over his hands, and he grumbles and swears while it sits smugly on the counter. The cup is pressed to his lips and tilted halfway back when Bobby’s message ends and he gets a _Hey, Dean--_ from 3:46 with a too-familiar, too-young voice before the sound of crunching plastic and _dammit_ , he needs another phone again.

He doesn't think about Sam when he finishes the tasteless coffee and brushes his teeth. He doesn't when avoiding his eyes in the cracked mirror or roughly slinging his bags onto the bed to pack his clothes and weapons for Atlanta. He doesn't think about Sam, not once, not even when he finds one of Sam’s few remaining novels that Dean had been trying to get through tucked under a shirt. He shoves _The Dark Half_ back beneath plaid--and several pairs of jeans, for good measure--and doesn’t think about it because Sam betrayed him and Sam gave up. It's not his Sam on this earth anymore.

He loads up Baby and he drives, because that's all he really has the energy for nowadays. It was a different story two months ago when he and Sam first parted ways, sure. Dean was free of his biggest responsibility next to saving the world, and Sam got what he deserved because, really, he had it a long time coming.

The giddiness faded after the first three weeks, and by the time the second month rolls around, a sort of melancholy acceptance has settled into the pit of Dean’s stomach. He’s alone, and he doesn’t have to worry about Sam, but that tiny niggling part of his brain _wants_ him to.

Warns him to, because something’s gonna--

 

Bobby gets ahold of him at five in the morning, after the third voicemail (the important one, the one that buzzed against the bedside table) gets lost in the broken panels and shattered sliding keyboard and Dean turns onto the correct exit. Luckily Dean still has a few phones stashed around here and there--this one being in the glovebox--and Bobby probably has pages upon pages of his various numbers.

It's the twentieth of August, and Bobby isn't calling about a rougarou.

The light is gone, the world is dark and Sam’s hands are still on fire, Sam’s holding the gun, Sam’s under the trees with a knife in his pocket. The world is dark and Sam is waiting at Mom’s side with his hands on fire.

Dean is pulling over on the highway with a jerk and a semi’s horn blares but who gives a damn, he can't breathe, he can't _breathe_ and he can't _move_ but his lungs are collapsing body’s shaking hands are gripping his hair until it’s yanked out and there's a hand on his back and a voice saying _listen to me, Dean, take a breath, I am here._ Who is here? No one's here but Dean, and he's all alone on this planet with angels biting at his feet.

The world is dragging. Bugs dance in the beams of Baby’s headlights. The light skips, once, twice, like moonlight. Under his knees and palms, the grass is slick and heavy with rain, and it feels a whole lot like blood.

There’s vomit in his mouth and sweat down his neck.

Fingers on his shoulder bring him close to a familiar warmth, the kind that isn't human.

Dean drinks and drinks and it isn't coffee, and he doesn't go hunt that rougarou in Atlanta because Bobby won't let him. Bobby won't let him leave the house (or the room or his body) and Cas has to take him by angel transport from Maine to South Dakota because apparently he can't be trusted to drive. Which is absurd, really, because Sam’s under the trees with a knife in his pocket and his hands are still on fire, and who's gonna get to him and hold him tight if Dean can't?

Cas finds Sam, too, of course. Somehow he gets the address in Oklahoma and takes care of it, takes care of it all and Dean doesn't know (doesn't want to know) the details, so Cas just holds his shoulders on the couch with a blanket cast across his lap when he can't stop fucking crying. And he feels something like shame curling in his stomach under the pain because he shouldn’t be sobbing like a baby in the lap of an angel, but it isn’t enough to make it stop. Bobby always tiptoed around him in these sorts of situations-- _Cold Oak-_ -and he was there but Dean couldn’t cry in front of him, couldn’t let that show, but for some reason, Cas is just...different. Maybe it’s the absence of a human soul, or concepts of men in general, but. Well. Dean can just _breathe_. And he does.

Sam had a quiet job in a quiet place, even if he still kept a pistol under his pillow and lined the room with salt, Bobby mentions to Cas one evening when he thinks Dean can't hear him. He wonders for a second how the fuck Bobby knows that, but then he remembers that Dean’s the one who kept Sam away in the first place and that it kind of makes sense because Sam probably would’ve still kept in contact with Bobby. Probably. And every night for Dean, Sam is quiet and unseeing with burning hands and a knife in his pocket beneath the trees a cold full bathtub a gun under his pillow.

 _What was it, Sam?_ Dean asks him every night, lips numb.

Sam smiles a wispy thing like some kind of pitiful reflection of himself, dark-eyed and sad. It’s almost apologetic. His face is white and blue. There are broken veins spidering across the hollows of his cheeks like trees.

 _It was the moment I killed Mom in the nursery that night. That's what started it all_ , he says, but that isn’t what Dean meant.

 _I deserve this,_ he says after a pause, but all of this isn’t what Dean wanted.

Cas has kind hands. They are gentle and warm and maybe Dean wants to die a little bit less whenever he's buried under blankets with him, but there's a gaping chasm inside and he doesn't know how to fix it. Cas doesn't either, he supposes, but he tries his best. He tries with a kiss to the temple and letting Dean fall into the folds of his wrinkled coat, and with soft words and open windows that let in the scent of fresh rain when everything else smells like death.

And sometimes Dean shoves him away, shouts and clenches his teeth like maybe that’ll make it leave, the _helplessness,_  and Cas stays silent with those same sad fucking eyes that just make Dean so much angrier.

That’s how Dad was, back when the Yellow-Eyed Demon was their biggest problem. Channel everything into rage, kill something when you’re hurting, take a drive with no feeling and hope half-heartedly you don’t run yourself off a fucking cliff. And anger works in those brief moments, but Dean can’t drive, and he sure as hell isn’t allowed to hunt. So he pushes it back and down but doesn’t apologize, _can’t_ apologize if he doesn’t have the energy for words.

Cas gets it. And he comes right back, and Dean is thankful.

Before everything, he thought that maybe this-- _they_ \--could be something, _anything_ , someday, because honestly, the idea of it has been growing on him. But after all, everyone Dean gets to know and love gets killed one way or another. It was only a matter of time before...before Sam would be on that list, too, and Dean is leaning towards never again taking the risk of ever writing another name ( _not_ _Cas, not Cas_ ).

Bobby watches like he understands. His face is drawn and he'd usually make a crack about the way Dean holds Cas’s fingers tight between his own, but he knows. They all know that it won't be the same, and it won't ever be up for discussion because Sam’s not here anymore. Sam would’ve grinned and raised a brow and Dean would’ve coughed and flipped him off, face red, but really he just--

 

No.

 

Dean is alone in a big, empty house with empty floors and empty books piled in corners (because none of them tell how to get Sam back, not this time) and the world is silent even when Castiel is murmuring in his ear. And one day the empty house is too quiet so he shouts and maybe throws some things. There’s broken china on the floor, probably something old and expensive, and the books are just lifeless covers with useless pages torn out and scattered alongside the remnants of a mirror. He winds up with Cas’s strong fist crushing his hands together, the other tapping his forehead gently with two fingers, and the pained--almost mournful--look the angel gives him makes Dean shudder and drop the knife of glass right then and there.

And it’s not just Sam, or the lack thereof, that’s keeping needles in his chest and eating up his lungs. It’s the oncoming apocalypse, too, and how he’s been surrounded by nothing but death since he was four. Everything just built up, he supposes, after Mom.

 _I know something you don’t know_ , Sam murmurs, blood bubbling over his lips and running down his chin. The back of his head is blown off, the wall is running with black sludge, the bathtub is full. There are cuts on his cheeks so deep the bone shows through.

 _Sammy_ , Dean says, and when he wakes up his hands won’t stop shaking.

Dean can't drive, can't hunt, and can't escape the empty house with only three hearts beating instead of four. And Bobby locks up the guns and pills God knows where. He handles them whenever Dean needs painkillers for his stitches--which he tore open again, of course--or sleep aids on the occasional nights when Cas isn't around. Baby’s trunk is empty now, too, and that pisses Dean off for a few seconds before he remembers that he just can’t feel anything anymore. Maybe Bobby should shut him in the soundless panic room already so Dean can finally just go insane like he was always meant to.

He dreams that Sam’s acceptance letter is shredded in a clammy, clenched fist. He dreams that Sam looks at himself in the mirror three times, feverish and wild-eyed after leaving Stanford in pieces in the trash. He dreams that Sam doesn't wait years, but merely seconds with his pale reflection tasting metal and the walls covered in red and black.

Those dreams aren’t as bad as the ones on the  _other_ nights, the ones that come most frequently.

Mom is gone from the nightmares, now. Now there’s only Sam and those trees, with that too-familiar stench of hellfire and melting organs. Sam reaches out, blue against a background of scarlet, and his hand curls around Dean’s arm. The skin is blistering. Dean sees his brother’s bones bursting from his fingertips, and for a moment he looks up in horror to find a figure behind them in the reflection of the mirror walls. Sam mouths words to him, but the sounds of screaming drown out everything. He thinks, when Sam draws close enough, that he might be muttering _I won’t say yes I won’t say yes I won’t say yes_ over and over like a mantra. The fire is bitterly cold around them, even though Sam is _burning alive_ , and Dean wants to tell him so many things, _Sammy why why I’m sorr--_

He wakes up to an open window and freezing wind against his body.

One morning, Dean heads to the bathroom to take a piss and he catches something dark moving in his peripherals. It scares the shit out of him so badly, his fucking _reflection,_ that when he calms down from his episode and comes back later he discovers that Bobby apparently removed every mirror from downstairs. And doesn’t that just make him feel pitiful as hell.

Most of all, his days are foggy from painkillers for the closing wound in his side and Cas-induced sleep that he otherwise wouldn’t get, and he dreams. And dreams. And dreams.

The figure gets closer, golden eyes glowing, and the mirrors crack and split until they shatter. Dean backs up a footstep each time— _each dream_ —until he’s up against a broken frame. Glass digs deep into his arms like Sam’s fingers where they plunge under his ribs and he gasps, blood coating his teeth and chin, when chains curl around Sam’s mangled wrists.

And the days drag on like months, like Hell.

Cas tells him, _Dean, you have to eat,_ and yeah, maybe Dean does need a shower and a new change of clothes, but he also needs either those warm hands all over him or the barrel of a gun, so. He eats--for Cas, for their _something_ \--but everything is dust, and he showers but the hot water reminds him of blood so Cas finds him sitting against the back of the door with sopping hair letting the water run cold. Dean lets himself droop in his arms and shakes, and shakes, and shakes.

“It will take time, Dean. I am here.” It’ll take more time than he’ll ever have, more time than any angel could ever give him. He’s weak and helpless and confused like he’s never been before, because at least when Sam was off at college he was only a phone call away.

So he dreams. And dreams. And dreams.

 _Dean_ , Sam growls through tears, _you have to leave._

The chains twist faster and faster, writhing and burning into Sam’s forearms. The moonlight pulses like a strobe light. The screaming echoes in Dean’s ears as blood bubbles up from his throat. His brother is still pale, still decorated in wriggling black veins, but not blank anymore. Not a Sam-less void, a broken shell.

 _Dean_ , Sam cries, when black wings spread from the shadow figure’s shoulders behind them, _you have to get out._

Dean wakes up with his chest heaving, tears on his face instead of blood. Cas isn’t there so he stays on the couch where he fell asleep, hands shaking and eyes open to the ceiling where the shadows don’t move and the mirrors don’t look back at him. He manages to stay awake for two nights after that, pacing, trying to avoid those _eyes_ and the flames roaring in the black, smoking forest.

Cas is the one who closes his bloodshot eyes and wills his mind to sleep.

Then, one night, he blinks and he’s asleep, blinks again and Sam is right there, three inches from his face, arm half-buried into the cavity of Dean’s chest.

 _S-Sammm_ , he slurs, but there isn’t any pain.

Sam’s gaze moves back and forth across Dean’s face. His hand gropes against Dean’s lungs.

 _I’m sorry, I can’t say yes_ , he breathes, voice cracking, and then he suddenly stills. There is a shadow hand on his shoulder, fingers bleeding down Sam’s chest in black rivers of mist. The eyes flash red and the wings open to the sky, dark and almost opaque enough to block out the flames.

 _It’s time_ , the shadow thing whispers. Sam pulls back with Dean’s heart pumping and gushing between his fingers. The chains binding his limbs shatter and fall. Sam sucks in a deep breath, and the raw flesh where the metal sat begins to stitch itself back together.

 _It’s okay now, Dean,_ Sam smiles, and Dean wakes up.

It’s the twentieth of September, and for some reason, he feels whole enough to get up out of bed and grab a glass of water.

He finds Bobby and Cas in the kitchen. Bobby’s knuckles are white with his hands clenched around the back of a chair like he wants to hurl it at the wall, and his face is pale. Cas looks grave, but that’s not entirely unusual.

Dean looks between them, and either something is wrong or else it’s terribly right. Bobby and Cas seem to exchange a look like Dean is a young child walking in on a very adult conversation. After a moment, Bobby sighs and Cas begins to speak. Something about hearing the angels screaming about a man, about the apocalypse being back on track, about burned bones and scattered ashes and--

 

Oh.

 

 _Oh_.

 

Now Dean really gets why Bobby’s hanging onto that chair for dear life. His face goes numb, and he can distantly feel his lips moving but the buzzing in his ears is too loud to hear anything that comes out. On his tongue it feels a lot like _Sammy_ but...but Sammy’s dead, right? Sammy left everything behind in an Oklahoma hotel room and in dreams in Dean’s head.

Then Cas is saying with a hard look in his eyes that the angels weren’t just talking about Sam, but of Lucifer, and how Lucifer made a promise but Sam tried to test him and he was just trying to teach his vessel a lesson, really. Ten years might not make him say _yes_ , but it would keep Sam from trying shit again. Because--because Sam is _the_ vessel, and it doesn’t make any _sense_ but Bobby adjusts his grip on the chair, jaw set, and tells Dean without looking at him that they’re going after Sam without Dean because they don’t really know what they’ll find.

Dean is ready to protest, fists clenched and mouth dry, but Cas somehow appears by his side in a second and--with a regretful look--places two fingers on his forehead.

In the end, it’s Sam who finds him first anyways. Dean wakes to a less empty house with not-so-empty floors and two heartbeats instead of just one.

 _Dean_ , he hears memories of Sam whisper in his head, mellow and suffocating with blood clotted in his throat. And then, “ _Dean_ ,” and that’s definitely not just in his mind, right?

“Sam?” he mumbles, eyes open to the dark room in a split second, hand searching under the couch pillow for a knife that isn’t there.

Something shudders in the corner, hidden behind the empty books, and Dean can practically feel the fire licking at his feet. He can almost taste the sludge and the bile from a hand twisting and pulling in his chest.

“Dean,” it (Sammy?) says again, voice wavering. Pale-faced and looming, the being fills the empty space so rapidly that Dean can sense it crushing down on his chest. And it’s not Sam, it can’t be _Sam_ but Dean can just barely remember Cas’s words about angels and vessels and it all sort of clicks. The addition of a heartbeat makes his head spin. He feels the flames swallowing him whole as he jumps up and reaches out through the stagnant air, and reluctantly Sam steps out from against the wall. Dean’s fingers curl into fists in the fabric of Sam’s jacket, stiff with old blood that turns to black powder against his hands.

He thinks he might be speaking (might be crying) and saying something like, “Sammy don’t you ever fucking do that to me again, you fucking hear me, I don’t care what’s happening, just talk to me and we'll work through it,” and Sam doesn’t say anything back. Dean just mumbles on into Sam’s collar, his little brother standing stiff with shaking fingers and breaths that hiss and catch beside Dean’s ear. The stench of blood on Sam is so strong that he could vomit, but when Dean finally pulls back, Sam’s skin is smooth and unmarked beneath his fingers. Sam lets him check both pale wrists and his neck with a blank face and eyes that drift past Dean’s shoulder until Dean shakes him.

“Dean, please.” Dean’s gaze roves over his brother’s face while he fishes through all of Sam’s pockets. A few plain white pills fall out of his jeans and scatter across the ground, along with a handful of crumpled receipts. He stills when his right hand taps the edge of something metallic in Sam’s coat, pulling out a folded pocket knife. As he flips it open, it only takes a second for him to register what’s on the blade before he hurls it across the room.

“Sam,” he whispers, and this time Sam really looks at him, startled with hands weakly grasping at the sleeves of Dean’s shirt.

Sam inhales. “I hurt you,” he manages, and his mouth quivers. Dean feels the stare of the golden eyes ripping him open once more and he shudders. “I-I couldn’t stop, he said it wasn’t _you_ the first time but that I had to learn my lesson and—”

 _He said_. Dean cuts him off by tugging him close again.“Only in dreams, Sammy. Only in dreams.” This time Sam reciprocates the hug, his hands slowly moving onto Dean’s back. “But you don’t _ever_ get to pull a stunt like that again. You hear me? I mean _ever_. Fuck, Sam, I thought I…” He swallows, squeezing his eyes shut tightly, because he does _not_ want to go back down that road.

“I’m sorry,” Sam mumbles into Dean’s shoulder. His breath is warm on Dean’s neck. Warm and alive and _Sam_. “I couldn't say yes,” he whispers, almost too quietly for Dean to hear, and chills run down his spine.

Cas zaps in with Bobby a few seconds later, both of them grim-faced and pale with guns held unsubtly by their sides, but Dean isn’t letting go just yet. He feels a hand on his back, warm and safe and perfect, holding him steady while Sam leans into his chest. There is hushed talking in the background, between the closest thing he’s ever had to a real father figure and the closest thing he’s ever had to _really something_ , but he drowns it out, listening carefully for Sam’s breathing.

He realizes as he holds his little brother with Cas and Bobby at his side that it could've been the end, the end of Sammy and the world and the long, long road, and it was all because he and Sam couldn't get their heads out of their asses. In hindsight, it's a lot easier to pinpoint where it all went wrong, before the dreams and Sam burning alive in a cold room with trees and mirrors extending for as far as the eye could see. Before the shadow angel and broken glass and an empty space where a heart should be. Before Sam thought it was a good idea to test promises.

 


End file.
